This was my favorite ice cream cone. But having it while I hurt was worse than not having it at all. I had the pleasure in my grasp but I tasted only discomfort. The soft ice cream leaked out of its chocolate cast and down the edges of the cone, streaking my hand.
“Eat up,” my father said as he finished the broken leg story. The cone fell. I hadn’t let it go, but I hadn’t held on either. I watched its graceful somersault and crushing splatter onto the concrete with morbid fascination. I was glad to see it destroyed.
My father and the waitress exclaimed with dismay. I looked up at Grandpa’s car and saw my mother staring at me. Grandma Jacinta was talking to her, again with an unusual animation and uncertainty. My mother’s curly flop of black hair, parted on one side and covering half of her brow, was still while she listened. That too was unusual. She always seemed to be in motion, especially her hair; it would tremble from her nervous energy. Her green eyes were wide as she stared at me. But she wasn’t seeing me. She didn’t react to the ice cream cone’s death.
I sagged. I didn’t keel over. I slumped against my father. I felt weak and exhausted. There was commotion. My mother came out of the car. Grandma called my name in a faraway panicked tone: “Rafa! Rafa!” The waitress said she’d get me water. Francisco picked me up.
“Ugh,” he groaned at my weight. “What a big boy you’ve become.”
“What’s wrong!” my mother said in an angry shout.
“He’s tired,” my father insisted. “You can lie down in the back, Rafael. We’ll go home and you’ll take a nap.”
I was horizontal in my father’s arms as he carried me to Grandpa’s car. The low Tampa buildings bounced. A blue car with a white hat bobbed up and down. It was across the avenue, stopped at a gas station, but not at a pump. I didn’t notice the occupants before my father turned away from them to angle me at the Plymouth. I wondered if the man with the baseball cap and aviator glasses was inside that blue and white car. I thought about mentioning the men and the car to my parents. Ruth had lectured me around Christmastime about strangers watching us. She told me to let her know if I saw men hanging around outside our apartment building. I asked why they would. She didn’t really answer. She said that some men had been questioning our neighbors about us. When I pressed for a fuller explanation, she was vague. (I had no idea that for a decade my parents had been subject on and off to harassment — some might prefer to call it surveillance — by the FBI. They had been members of the Communist Party until 1950 and then there was my father’s friendliness to Fidel’s Cuba.) She made me promise I would report any men lurking about. I wondered if these men in the blue and white car qualified.
I didn’t get a chance to bring it up. When Francisco maneuvered me to the rear door, a disagreement started between Ruth and Grandma about who was going to sit in the back with me. At first, they expressed their desires passively.
“Jacinta, you sit up front,” my mother said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
“No,” Grandma said, “there’s not enough room for you in the back.”
“There’s plenty of room.”
“No, I’ll be fine. I’ll put Rafa’s head on my lap,” Grandma insisted.
“I can put his head on my lap,” Ruth said.
“It’ll wrinkle your dress,” Grandma objected.
“For God’s sake,” my father said. “Somebody open the door!” He was still holding me. It was hot. He shifted me in his arms, weary from the weight.
Jacinta opened the rear door and slid to the far seat. “No!” my mother protested. Francisco put me in and Grandma eased my head onto her lap.
“I want to sit with him,” my mother insisted to Grandma. The sharp tone she used on Jacinta was rare — in fact, unique. She was always solicitous of Grandma. “Why aren’t you paying any attention to what I say? I’m his mother. I want to sit with him.”
“Take it easy,” my father mumbled.
“You take it easy,” my mother said loudly. She was angry, but she wasn’t hysterical. She had confidence. “It took over two hours to get Rafe treated. He hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast and he threw that up. I think he’s dehydrated and your great solution is to give him ice cream and pinch him and shove him around like he’s some chum in a bar—”
And then something extraordinary happened. So extraordinary that I completely forgot about my pain. My grandmother began to cry. She talked through the tears, saying in English to my mother, “It’s my fault. I know that. You blame me. I know I was stupid. I got so nervous. I know I ought to take him to the hospital right away.” Big tears rolled down the old woman’s face. One splashed on the bridge of my nose and rolled into my left eye. It stung a little. To see my dignified and reserved Grandma cry was amazing. Also her tone of voice was amazing. She sounded like a little girl pleading to be forgiven; oddly, she spoke with much less of an accent than she usually did. If I were to shut my eyes I couldn’t have recognized that voice as hers. “I’m an old fool. I know. But he was not hurt by my stupidity. He’s okay.” Grandma looked down and stroked my face. More tears fell on me. She wiped them off with her fingertips. “I would never hurt my only grandson.”
“Oh Jesus,” my mother moaned. It was her turn to cry. She put her hands to her temples, rubbed them and then covered her eyes, pushing the tears back. “I give up.” She opened the front door and got in. “I’m never right about anything!” she shouted at the windshield.
I fell asleep. I wakened somewhat as my father carried me to the guest bedroom. I heard voices greet Francisco with enthusiasm and quickly modulate to whispered concern about me. I kept my eyes shut.
The air in the room was still and hot. Ruth and Jacinta each brought in a fan. They argued over which one was more effective. They didn’t convince each other. After an ominous silence, my mother said they should keep both fans going. Ruth took off my sneakers and Jacinta lifted my head to slip a pillow underneath. I pretended to be asleep. In fact, with the heavy cast lying across my chest, I wondered if I could ever sleep again.
The guest bedroom was right off the living room and had a window looking onto the porch. Wide horizontal Venetian blinds covered the screen, but the window was up and I could hear my father hold court out there. Judging from the chorus of exclamations, questions and laughter that punctuated his storytelling, a crowd as large as what one would expect in the evening had already gathered, although it was still midafternoon. Twice my grandmother complained to the group that Francisco needed to rest from his flight, especially because he was due to be on the Tampa radio show at eight o’clock. My mother joined with Jacinta on this issue and said to my father that he had to stop talking by five so that he could get himself ready and eat some dinner.
“Let Frankie finish about the shoes!” a cousin complained. “Then we’ll go home and warm up the radios so we can listen to him tell those anti-Communists what true socialism is all about.”
My father told them that for decades Cuban children had been undernourished because they suffered from tapeworms. It was the primary cause of Cuba’s high rate of childhood mortality. Many died from opportunistic diseases made possible by the wasting effect of the worms. My father described how the worms grow in the stomach. (He told these stories in English, repeating key information in Spanish, evidently because he feared a particular relative wouldn’t understand.) He said the worms wound themselves around and around in the intestines and got to be as long as six feet, sometimes twice as long as the child is tall. Under Batista’s rule medical treatment was never free, even if the illness were life-threatening. Drugs existed that would kill the worms in a matter of weeks. American children could get a prescription from their pediatrician and have it filled for a moderate cost or for free through various agencies or clinics, but the price of the medicine was ten times higher in Cuba thanks to Batista’s profiteering. Anyway, even at the lower American cost, the pills would be more than a Cuban peasant could afford.